Friday, August 10, 2007

SEO Facts

There are a lot of rumors that go around the net that all you need to do is submit your website to thousands of search engines and traffic will immediately start avalanching to your website like never before. The problem with those rumors is that they simply are not true.
Ranking high in the search engines and collecting traffic as a result is a fairly complicated and time consuming process. It will take some work and dedication, but the end result can be rewarding. I will attempt to summarize the concepts of search engine marketing and help you get your start today.

I think it is safe to say we all know what search engines are. Just go to Google.com for an example. You type words, it finds related web sites.

As an advertiser, you should instantly see the potential in using search engines as a tool to get traffic to your own site. And in fact search engines are a very powerful marketing tool that can prove very helpful if properly utilized.

The first mistake most newbie marketers make is to submit their site to search engines without ever optimizing their web page. Now in order to be able to optimize your web page, you must first own the web page.

Search engine optimization is a detailed, lengthy process that would be to difficult for me to get into complete detail here, so I’ll leave it up to you to do a little research of your own to learn how.

I will still leave you with the most crucial tips to get you on your way and to keep you from making fatal mistakes.

What is more important to optimize?
a) Meta tags
b) content
c) both are important

In my opinion, both are important to attend to, but even more important than optimizing your meta tags is optimizing your content. Most of today’s search engines (especially the largest -- Google), focus more on your content as a guide to relevancy than your meta tags. It is not bad to optimize your Meta tags with a good description and keywords, but just remember that even more important is your content optimization.

Review your web site content and look for creative ways to strategically add into your content the keywords which you are focusing on reaching. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “Internet marketing,” you will want to ensure that the phrase “Internet marketing” appears frequently within your sites ad copy. The more it appears, the greater your chances of being listed high are. Yet be sure to do this within reason. Your website is made primarily to read by humans, not search engines.

Of course, as I said meta tags are still an important issue to attend to as well. While Google may not use meta tags much at all as a guide to relevancy, some other popular search engines still do.
Meta tags are the html tags in between the tags of your html, found at the top html of your web page.

For example…


[meta content="" name="description"]
[meta content="Your Keywords go here" name="keywords"]
[meta content="" name="author"]

Note: The [] tags are used instead of the <> tags.

In the above example the [title] tag is a description of your site that will appear on the browser taskbar at the top of browser. This description should accurately explain your site, but it should also be rich with your most important keywords.

In the [meta name=”description”] tag, you will want to include a short description of your web site. This is what appears as your description when you appear in the search results on some search engines. While this description should be rich in your targeted keywords, it should more importantly accurately describe your site. If you write a description optimized with keywords, but that doesn’t make sense to humans, no one will click through to your site.

The [meta name="keywords"] tag is where you will type your targeted keywords, separated by a comma.

In the [meta name="author"] tag, you will want to include a short description about yourself, the author. Make it accurately describe you, but also don’t be afraid go ahead and puff yourself up a little bit.

Let me guess what you’re thinking now?

You’re wondering what keywords you should use and how you should choose them.

Well, the best advice is to keep your keywords targeted and narrow, rather than broad.

For example, rather than using the broad search term, “network marketing,” try using a less searched, more targeted keyword like “network marketing training.” Even while narrow, targeted keywords get searched less, you will be competing with less people for the top spots and will end up with a higher position under that keyword and ultimately more traffic in the end.

Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for a cool tool to help you choose your keywords. You type in a broad search term, and it suggests narrow search terms.

The other optimization tip to keep in mind is link popularity. Again, this is especially a factor with Google, but since Google is by far the most used and accounts for about 70% of all Internet searches, it is wise to focus on being optimized for Google most of all.

Link popularity has to do with how many other pages there are on the Internet with links to your pages. The more pages linking to you and the greater the link popularity of the pages linking to you, the greater your link popularity will become.

Many people believe they can solve this problem by simply submitting to thousands of Free For All (FFA) link sites and instantly have thousands of sites linking to them. But the unfortunate truth is that Google and most other search engines can recognize and ignore the links to your site which reside on FFA sites. So the point here is, don’t bother wasting your time submitting to thousands of FFA sites because it doesn’t help you.

What does help your link popularity is taking the time to submit your site to all the major web directories (such as www.dmoz.org).

These sites are credible and have a high link popularity rating, which will only help your link popularity rating in the end. A good site to go to for a listing of all the biggest and best directories to submit to for traffic and increased link popularity


Developing key partnerships with other web sites is the other way to increase link popularity. You can find other web pages that you would like to be linked to and swap links. You create a page on your site with links to only a select few web sites and they do the same There are many other optimization tricks and the more tricks you use the better your chances of ranking higher will be, but just remind yourself not to get to obsessed with search engine ranking and remind yourself that there are other advertising methods to attend to.

Get your site basically optimized and submitted to start off, then come back and tweak it over time. After you have finished your optimization, you are now ready to submit to the search engines.

Although you may be dazzled by the chance to submit your site to 400,000+ search engines (or other such offers) with one click, please remember one thing… That although there are thousands of search engines out there, only a handful really matter.

The truth is that a handful of the major search engines account for about 96% of all search engine traffic. So it is quite obviously more beneficial to focus on getting submitted to the major players, rather than all the thousands of little ones. With that said, let me suggest that you throw automated search engine submission tools out the window right now and submit manually.

After all, only a handful of the top engines even matter and you will almost always see better results with your rankings when submitting manually. In addition, when you submit manually, you know it’s really getting done. So what are the top search engines that power thousands of other search engines and account for about 96% of all search engine traffic?

1) Google (http://www.google.com/addurl.html)
2) FAST (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
3) Inktomi (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
4) Teoma (http://ask.ineedhits.com)
5) AltaVista (http://av.ineedhits.com/)

While Google may be free to submit to, others like Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista cost money to submit to. My advice would be that unless you have spent some time on optimization and know that your site is going to do well on the search engines; don’t spend the money on paid submission engines.

The only advantage to the paid submission engines is that there is usually not as much competition on them because they aren’t free. However, you can use a little known trick to get on the paid submission engines free. What you do is find someone else with a website already listed on these engines and get them to list a link to your site on their site. Then, when the Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista spiders come to crawl their sites, it will find your link, go to your site, and add your site to their index.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

What is Internet Marketing? Introduction & Information

This article is for the people who don’t know much of Internet Marketing. Let me introduce this powerful source of marketing in my words.

Web has been always evolving, changing, searching & indexing with Time. But the new trend of Marketing / Promoting through Internet as primary medium is quickly catching on, in the present dynamic world. In comparison with traditional Advertising, Online promotions tend to offer best deals to consumers / customers since they can attract large number of target audience / visitors to their websites if they have Search Engine Friendly site with good mix of Marketing and Optimization. This helped the overall market of Online Advertising very much.

Internet Marketing is also referred as Online / Web Marketing also. It has many components. Some of them are as follows:

· Search Engine Marketing
· Search Engine Optimization
· Social Media Optimization and Marketing
· Viral Marketing
· Banner Advertisement
· Including in Comparison Shopping Sites
· E-mailers / Email Marketing

SEO Tools - QTP to Automate SEM Tasks

Anytime did you have any idea to automate some of the tedious, time taking SEO tasks?

I got it today and here is the solution for it.

QTP ( Quick Test Professional ) is an excellent Automation Tool which would solve the manual work which is repetitive. It is actually an automated testing solution which provides functional test and regression test automation.

Search Engine Optimizers ( SEO ) and Search Engine Marketers ( SEM ) can use QTP to full advantage by automating the Pay Per Click ( PPC ) campaign Management, Search reports generation for Analysis, keyword optimization in Bulk and can even manage campaign bid optimization.

QTP works in two modes

1) Context Sensitive Depending on the clicks and
2) Low Level will considers mouse movements such as X and Y co-ordinates

QTP has two View options

1) Keyword View: In this view, we can see the Screens.
2) Expert view: This view is where the Code is written. Coding will also include scripting

QTP also has the following Check Points

1. Standard - Used for Text
2. Page - Can be used to check page download time
3. Bitmap - may be used to check the images
4. Database Checkpoint
5. XML Checkpoint
6. Accessibility Checkpoint
7. Text Checkpoint

All the QTP is working based on the macros saved in Object Repository Manager.
- - - Here the activities are recorded
- - - Macros can be defined and analyzed

QTP also has feature called Exception Handling. This is used in Recovery Scenarios.
This option would handle run-time errors. Hence the process will flow smoothly.

Use Quick Test Professional as a Search Engine Optimization Tool and enjoy Automated SEO Tasks.

Fast Optimization Techniques for websites

Below are the set of optimization tips all can try for really quick results in Search Engines.

1) Use Blog optimization. You will achieve it.

2) Create a blog, attach to your site and ping all the major blog search, technorati websites.

3) Use web 2.0 websites to promote your website. Have articles, post in forums, comment in others blogs and reach Top 50, 100 of web 2.0 sites.

These all can be achieved in hours...

Last but not least, traditional option. Create Google sitemap in XML and submit it to Google, sitemap.html to your homepage and urllist.txt (sitemap with only URLs, save it with that name) submit it to yahoo. MSN accepts all of above.

Latest Technique is

Have link to your website from very high PR value sites. This is the best form of creating instant worth to your site and traffic flows. It Works. 100%.

Optimize pages for Social Media Sites - SMM - SMO

Social Media optimization and Marketing could give you traffic (yes, targeted traffic) in long term without bothering of spending for clicks/visits.

Promote your website in web 2.0 sites and try to make them popular by asking all of our friends to add the website to their online bookmarking accounts. Write Articles and post your signature, comment in popular blogs, Answer in Yahoo Questions, reply in Forums, be a part of all happening web 2.0 sites.

One of my site had 258 sources of traffic. Many of them, honestly speaking I too don’t know... It happens and it happens when you are having success in the above said SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Social Media Optimization / Marketing - SMO & SMM - Online Networking

What is Social Media optimization (SMM) and Social Meda Marketing (SMM)?

The concept is, With your Social Network, Create your Brand or promote through Word-of-Mouth on internet.

You need good networking / communication skills for this. And also copywriting...

Have a profile in Facebook, myspace and orkut.... try to add yourself into communities / Groups - connnect to people and message / scrap / ping them.

hi5, ringo and some others too are good social netwrking sites.

Then gofor online Bookmarking sites.
Digg, Del.icio.us and reditt are cool.

Then write articles / post and digg them, add them to these bookmarking sites.
Same day, have ur friends too add ur page to their online bookmarking acccounts.

Then go for Article submission directories / Press Release websites.
Write about your website/blog - what services/products you provide or just give info.

This all, if you can do it for the next 3-4 weeks, u would start SMO and SMM.

PPC Campaign Management - Google Adwords - Pay Per Click Tips

I came across an interesting conversation regarding PPC Campaign management.
Hope this will help you all to manage you Pay Per Click Campaigns.

Q: How to do keyword price adjustments in ppc?
A: check your landing page - your keyword and adcopy, all these 3 should contain the keyword. Add ur keywords in meta tags too. This all will make the ad quality score GREAT but not OK or POOR. Hence u can adjust PPC value.

Q: How to Lower CPC (Cost Per Click) by increasing CTR (Click Thru Rate)?
A: First of all, try to identify the ideal position for your ad in the ranking page as its displayed on search engine. You have position preference in Adwords, where your ad will be shown only if the position you specified is guaranteed for your keyword at a certain CPC. Enabling this feature will result in increase your CTR very much, but be careful it may reduce your number of impressions and hence clicks.


Q: What are Longtail Keywords?
A: Longtail refers to additional keywords which could surround your main product/service and make sense (Actually the whole combination of general words with your main keyword which can be queried by users on search engines)

Q: How to get more longtail keywords?
A: Try to use thesaurus and have keyword research on wordtracker or Google sandbox keyword tool. Check for your referral log (really a Gold Mine) on your server. This too gives you keywords which are getting you visitors to your website.

Q: Suppose I am using one landing page for 40 keywords, can I put 40 keywords in meta tag of landing page?
A: yes, u have to.... otherwise whats the use of a page - u put pen on meta tags and sell shoes in that page?
Your relevancy will increase if u use keywords in meta tags.

Q: How to create and manage an ideal PPC Campaign?
A: Simple - create campaigns then Adgroups with a Relevant Adcopy and insert Keywords.
You will need to group similar landing page keywords into 1 adgroup.
Campaign name and adgroups should also contain keywords.
We need to put all keywords of adgroup into landing page.
You have advanced options for keyword insertion at adcopy level and destination url level too

Ex: If shoes is campaign then walking and running should be adgroups. shoes/Product names should be the keywords.

Back Links Creation without Link Exchange

Follow the below points and it would be very easy to create lots of non-reciprocal Link backs from other websites/web pages.

1. Directory Submission: To have more Backlinks, submit your website for free web directories. Dmoz is the first directory to be submitted, as Google prefers it. In Paid directories, Yahoo Directory listing with $299 is worth a try.
There are hundreds of free directories and some of the others take nominal fees to include your website in their directories.
Only caution is submit into right and relevant category in those directories and also change the linking text (Famously called as Anchor Text). Have 4-5 variations of Linking Text and also Descriptions.
If its possible try to include Inner page (deeper webpage) of your website into the directories which helps in getting visitors directly to the Product/Service page than to the homepage.

2. Blog Promotion: Try to promote your website in blogs. Search for high ranking, most famous blogs in your field and Comment in those blogs. Try to actively participate in others blogs and keep intouch with popular blog writers. With good rapport from your side, someday they may write about your website. You never know, what goodness can bring to you in your life...

3. Signature: Have your signature with web address in your emails and in messages which you respond in forums. This will increase your websites traffic.

4. Promote by Publishing: Try to give Press Releases (Many free services are available on net) and create Articles and submit to all article websites. When they are published, you will get free back links from good places.